UP to 100 people attended a meeting about the proposed plans to build a giant pig farm in a village near Burton.
The meeting, jointly organised by organic food and animal welfare campaigners The Soil Association and the Pig Business film team, saw scores of concerned residents and industry farmers cram into Burton’s Town Hall to hear about the potential development in Foston.
The gathering follows a planning application submitted by Midland Pig Producers (MPP) to build a ‘mega farm’ which would house 2,500 sows and 20,000 piglets. If the plan were to be given the green light, this would be one of the UK’s largest pig farms, with the size of largescale intensive pig farms in the UK currently being between 500 and 900 sows.
Months of debate between MPP, animal welfare campaigners, environmental bodies and farmers preceded the meeting which brought the focus of the debate to local residents who will feel the impact of farm on a daily basis if the plans were to go ahead.
Concerns were voiced about how their quality of life would be affected by the inevitable smells and noise pollution and how the transportation of 1,000 pigs each week to slaughter would affect traffic in the area.
Following the recent news stories connecting MRSA and E.coli with intensive farming, many people also expressed concerns about the potential health implications.
The Dark Side of Farming — a short film produced by the company Pig Business, summarised the implications of antibiotic use in factory farms. The film drew attention to the global implications of factory farming, animal welfare issues and health implications for pigs and humans associated with farming on such an intensive scale.
Peter Melchett, The Soil Association policy director, said at the event: “We are against the introduction of mega farms into the UK and our objections are largely based on health: the risks to pig health and human health.
“There are real concerns that unless antibiotics are used more sparingly we’ll find a range of human diseases that we Potential ‘mega’ pig farm problems shown in film just can’t treat.
“We’ll go back to a period — which none of us are old enough to remember — when all sorts of common diseases were lethal, and that will be true for animals as well as people.”
Jim Davies, a local activist who has been at the spearhead of objections to the farm, said: “I haven’t got issues with MPP, but I have with what they’re proposing. It’s too big and it doesn’t need to be this size. The technology in all of this is really untried in the UK — we are a great big guinea pig in Foston and we’re having it tested on us.”
Dominic West, star of the television show The Wire, who grew up in the area, has also shown his support for the campaign.
Further information about the campaign can be found online at www.soilassociation.org or at www.pigbusiness.co.uk.
